7/29/11

I'm writing this dropbox review as a former student and current instructor. I do get a little extra space in my own personal free dropbox if you sign up for a free dropbox account (and so do you!) but I think this product is great in spite of this incentive. Have you ever been working on a homework assignment or important project and your hard drive crashes or you somehow lose it? Dropbox is a potential answer, it is a program that stores up to 2gb (for free) in a cloud, that you can access anytime on your desktop similar to opening a folder or a flash drive. Other programs allow you to get 2gb of online storage for free, but are not nearly as convenient as dropbox.

It is possible to get more space by paying money, but I think 2gb is fine for most students and for personal use. While you cannot store movies, or lots of pictures, you can store the most important ones, and also 2gb is enough to store most data sets and school related work.

As an added bonus to dropbox, you can install the folder on all of your computers or smart phones to gain access to photos, movies, music, and schoolwork wherever you happen to be. It is also possible to obtain your files via a web browser by signing into your account through your dropbox account on their website. This means that you can work on your stuff even if you are at a public computer, such as a computer lab or library.

Finally, dropbox allows you to share files with other dropbox users. This has come in handy recently for me because of a project I have been working on. We are using simulation software, and the average file size is 98mb, which is too large for most email services to handle. Luckily we have been working in adjacent offices are were able to transfer files via thumb drive, but when we both went traveling for the summer we wanted to keep in contact and share the most recent version of the program. Instead of signing up for ftp space through our university we both got dropbox and were able to share files immediately and easily.

Really, I love dropbox, there are so many things you can do with it and if you only use 2gb it is free. Other programs out there allow you to get 2gb of online storage for free, but are not nearly as convenient as dropbox.